I came THIS close to buying an 830 yesterday for my laptop. I even did a search for "Samsung 840" to see if there was any news of a successor, to no avail. Still, something stopped me from doing it, and it looks like my procrastination paid off...Reply

Same here. I kept seeing the 830 show up in sales but couldn't find any rumors about a next generation drive. I've been putting off my new build for a while now. Prior to waiting on the 840 I waited for the next Nvidia release which ended up being the 660TI. I get everyone worry about a new SSD drive but by the time I actually pull the trigger on everything it will have been out a month and I'll know by then.Reply

If you can get the 830 at a massive discount, why not go for it? A couple of thoughts:

1) I would never put a new-to-market SSD in on of my machines. It's not worth the risk. Check back in 6 months, or a year, and see how they have held up.2) There's no discernible difference in performance among any of the top-tier SSDs under normal workloads. Anand and company make these drives jump through flaming hoops (i.e. their Bench suite) before they see differences between the drives under normal workloads.

I'd rather buy something that is fast, proven reliable, and at a good price. I'll let others be the crash test dummies for new SSDs.Reply

Yeah, I thought about that, too. Why not go for a cheaper, proven drive that's nearly as fast? On the other hand, I bought a 320 based on its reputation for reliability, and a month later, bam, 8MB power bug, so you really never know.

In my case, my laptop is not a mission-critical device; I have a desktop, as well as access to other laptops in the house, so if it suddenly needs service, it's not the end of the world. It's on me to do regular backups, and the 840 Pro has a FIVE YEAR warranty. So I think maybe I will be the crash test dummy this time, for the heck of it. Worst case scenario, I can always just toss the original hard drive back in there.Reply

The thing is, you're not going to ever notice the difference between the 830 and the 840, or even the Crucial M4. I've seen the 256GB Crucial M4 for as low as $140 in the past couple weeks. That is a much better purchase than the 840 if the 256GB 840 is any more then $180 or so.Reply

Back when I got my Intel 320 SSD, I bought it because of Intel's reputation for reliability. Then they went with Sandforce controllers and I just don't trust them anymore. Meanwhile, Samsung also developed a reputation for reliability, and I'm inclined (perhaps unfairly) to trust them over other manufacturers.

I'll be curious to see what Samsung and Anand have to say about the failure of the unit used for this review. I could still see going for the 830 if there's an indication that reliability HAS been compromised in some way.Reply

I couldn't agree more. I have two Samsung 830's, and they have been bulletproof. I used them to replace two Intel 520's, one of which was BSODing several times a day, and the other intermittently, both on previously stable systems. The SF-2281 controllers on those still need work, in spite of Intel's best efforts to date. The 830's have reliable, proven controllers. In practice, they are as wicked fast as the 520's. I never regretted switching over from Intel. While the 840's are likely to take the performance crown, to me, the 830 is fast enough, and new controllers make me nervous. Give me a year of proven stability, and I'll consider switching (of course, the 850 will be out by then...).Reply

The only problem with waiting a year: with Moore still in control (mostly, really, integration) controllers go out of style in a year. I wonder how long any stable manufacturers (let alone the likes of OCZ) will still have a controller 3 or 5 years out?

IOW, just as we don't really need the "improved" iPhoneX every so often, the same is true in the SSD space. It's planned obsolescence. Reply

After moving my Steam folder from my SATA II Intel 320 160Gb to my SATA III Samsung 830 64GB and seeing basically no difference in load times, I have to say that I'll probably keep my eyes peeled for deals on the 830, rather than jumping on the 840. If I could get a 512GB for my laptop for under $400, I'd jump on it and not worry about the difference in performance.Reply

Agree on the massive discount, but... so far I haven't seen a "massive discount." The 256gig drive I've been eyeing has been hovering around the $200 price point for a long time now. That's not massive to me. Newegg priced it once for $180 and that was pretty decent for a "massive" discount, but they only did that twice and haven't done it in a long while (ie., since I had the cash to invest).

This is especially relevant when I expect the 840 Pro to drop around that point ($200-ish) once supply matches demand within a couple of months. I'm not interested in beta testing TLC for Samsung either.

And I'd probably pay an extra $20 ($220) to have the superior performance/perf per watt of the 840 when push comes to shove.Reply

Very impressive indeed. Quite a decent improvement on their main performance competitor - their own 830. Don't think it'll be necessary to upgrade from said 830 in my desktop, since that is lovely and fast already, though with the far lower power consumption this could be an ideal laptop upgrade for pretty much anyone :)Reply

Mmm... bumping up against that SATA 6 Gbps wall. I can't wait for SATA Express to bust through this wall. I know the faster interface won't make much difference for typical real-world use cases, but SSD performance has increased so quickly over the past few years, I don't want to see its progress slowed by an interface bottleneck.Reply

While a 2GB/sec sequential access would be awesome - no disagreement there - it won't feel like much of an upgrade without a significant gain in random IO. A drive that hits the 6Gbps peak in random 4K access would impress me more.Reply

Whatever the next interconnect is, I hope they build it for the next 10 years. I'm tired of all these incremental improvements requiring different cables. Maybe I've just been building computers too long?Reply

True but i think there will be a bottleneck somewhere else once we hit certain number of Random Read. Anand already has results that any more then 40~50MB/s random wrote give us any more benefits. I think it would be similar for Random Read as well although we have so far not reach that point yet.

Of coz these results are with today's software. Things could be different again when we reach that limit.Reply

I'd like to know what Samsung's measuring for that number too; Anand measured the 840 pro an order of magnitude higher during write operations. Unless that number is just for the controller and not for the flash too there's something not right about the gap between that number and what AT's measuring.Reply

This is completely correct. Anandtech and basically every other review site out there measures power consumption wrong: they measure it while *not* booted into an OS that supports SATA power management. With DIPM (device initiated power management) enabled, the drive should hit this power consumption easily.

Same goes for pretty much every other SATA SSD these days. They're all well below 0.3W idle except for Sandforce drives. For instance, all Intel drives (intel- and marvell-based) are about 75 to 100mW idle.Reply

Yeah, and no measurement of read power usage. Even though the typical user probably do an order of a magnitude more reads than writes. But thats a general anandtech testing problem, too much focus on the write specs instead of the more important read specs.Reply

The Anand hd bench was an excellent tool for comparisons, and one of the great tools Anand provided for us for delivering bm that reflected real world usage.

What i derived from the first 2010 results was that the samsung disk was bad, but not so bad as it was portrayed by the reviewers and Anand. They were not worth their money, but they were slammed way to hard. At that time if we look at fx. strartup times, they were practically as fast as the fastest, so the criticism was ok, but a tad overblown.

At that time many producers was as Anand said, not focusing enough on random 4k, but i can say for sure, nothing but random 4k write was usable here at anandtech at that time too :)Reply

As usual, I'm curious about the data retention properties of drives, and how they change across a drive's lifespan as P/E cycles increase. It would be difficult to check directly, but perhaps the manufacturers can reveal the details? I also wonder if TLC will be disastrous in this regard.Reply

I asked about that in the Q&A session we had with Samsung engineers today but unsurprisingly, they couldn't tell us specific numbers. I hope to get my hands on 120GB 840 and 128GB 840 Pro to see what's the write endurance like, though that will take a while to test.Reply

While the 840 Pro kicks ass, I wonder if the 3bpc 840 is going to have less endurance while offering the same performance as the previous gen 830 drive... If that's the case buy them up while they're on sale in the next few months before they run out. Unless another SSD maker comes out with a drive that tops the 840 Pro, it's going to command a premium price per gb for some time.Reply

I ended up buying a Samsung 830 about a year ago and I have absolutely loved it, fast performance plus rock stable. I might consider grabbing one of these when the price comes down a bit.

I was wondering if say Samsung or any other SSD manufacturer didn't care about power consumption as much, and say clocked those 3 cortex A9 cores @ 700Mhz instead of 300, would 4k random performance increase significantly? Or are these SSDs mainly limited by firmware still even at 300Mhz, so increasing the clockspeed won't have much impact. What about if they added a 4th core instead of increase clock speed?Reply

... to replace my aging Intel 320 series (300GB). Just wondering if it will make a tangible (in my eyes) difference in day to day use, since I don't care about benchmarking. Maybe it will be better to pick up a cheaper 830 which is proven to be reliable... either way, the Intel will go to my PS3 since I'm pretty sure it will be nearly useless to sell in the used market.Reply

I'm kind of in a similar boat, kind of wanting to upgrade my desktop's 160GB 320 with a drive that's faster and a bit more spacious. I had paired it with a 64GB Samsung 830 to free up the space used by the memory swap file, but I probably wouldn't do that if I got a larger drive.

I could probably use the 64GB drive for my Steam folder, but I'd still be left with the 160 GB 320, as well as another 40 GB 320...it's like, what would I use those drives for? I guess I could hang onto them for when I get around to building a Linux box...Reply

-- I had paired it with a 64GB Samsung 830 to free up the space used by the memory swap file

I've always wondered: a swap file gets hammered, so when partitioning a drive with some swap and some user file system, does leveling only happen *within* the user defined partition? Or does the controller (or varying by controller) level across devices without regard to partitions?

I had thought about that as well, when I decided to move the swap file; I wish Windows would let you move the hibernate image file too, for the same reason. That being said, though...I'm just not that worried about it, anymore. I don't think swap files or even hibernating your computer are going to do your SSD in prematurely.Reply

Really? 'Cause I have to say I never felt that the 320 quite lived up to all the hype about SSDs. And the sequential read times of the 840 should be significantly higher than those of the 320, right? Meaning that your boot times, application load times, level load times, etc. should be noticeably faster?Reply

I think I might move my Steam folder to my 64GB 830 (if it hasn't grown too large) and see if Portal II level load times improve. The write times take a hit due to the smaller number of NAND chips, but the read times should be mostly limited by SATA 3 bandwidth. I'll try to pop back in here with a report of any improvements that I see.Reply

Long story short, despite the fact that the 830 64GB beats out the 320 160GB in seven of eight CrystalDiskMark tests (88% in sequential reading, 95% in 512K random read, and so on, except for 4K random write with a queue depth of 32, where the Intel is 70% faster)...

...I honestly can't say it takes noticeably less time to either load games like Portal, Portal 2, or Quantum Conundrum, or to load levels/saves in those games. Portal 2 might start up a tiny bit faster on the new drive, but I certainly wouldn't swear to it.Reply

The article mentions that this drive uses the new Toggle 2.0 interface which operates at 400 Mbps, however individual packages are clearly capable of more than that if 8 packages can provide sequential speeds greater than 400 MB/s.

My understanding is that both ONFI 3.0 and Toggle 2.0 support data rates of 400 MT/s. It would seem that the maximum transfer size for ONFI is 8 bits, so they claim 400 MB/s for the interface. Is the 400 Mbps number for Toggle 2.0 a per die figure? Is it not also capable of 8 bits per transfer and thus 400 MB/s as well?Reply

400Mbit/s is the speed of the Toggle-Mode 2.0 interface but the the interface is 8 bits wide, making the maximum throughput 400MB/s per interface. I know it's stupid that they say 400Mbps because it's just confusingReply

Thank You for the review Anand, but is there any chance you and Kristian could start controlling the variables that are not being tested in future SSD reviews? CPU power saving features (EIST/Turbo) being left on in some reviews, while off in others, definitely affects performance.Reply

SATA uses 8b/10b encoding, so 6Gb/s becomes 600MB/s. Then, just like any transfer protocol, there's additional protocol overhead. The AS-SSD sequential read speeds posted by this drive would demonstrate just better than 85% efficiency, which is not too shabby.Reply

"The first Samsung MLC SSDs were reliable, they just weren't worth the money when you had much better options from companies like Intel."

Intel stuck it to X25M G1 owners by refusing to provide a firmware update to support TRIM. If you're going to praise Intel and criticize Samsung so much in the opening of an article, that should have been noted.Reply

Technically this all looks great. Nice performance and power characteristics across the board. But where is the real distinguishing factor? All these drives are getting capped out thanks to SATA limitations and how much am I going to notice the difference between 500 MB/s and 490 MB/s in real world usage? Prices remain high and capacities remain low. We have reliability, high performance, low power usage and even TRIM over RAID now. SAMSUNG, INTEL, MICRON, OCZ, SANDISK, are you listening?! We need higher CAPACITIES, NOT irrelevant PERFORMANCE gains from intermittent firmware tweaks every six months!

I read somewhere that it's going to take another year/year-and-a-half for them to build/expand/retool plants to the point where we can see reasonable capacity increases at reasonable prices but it's very frustrating and disappointing to see basically no improvement upon capacities with extremely sluggish price improvement. It's getting to the point where I'm not even interested in new SSD reviews anymore.

However if capacities ever hit 2TB+ for $250-$300 I have a hard time imagining what could compel me to buy traditional HDDs when my main concerns with such an array would boil down to a mechanical failure somewhere, heat, noise and space (which are all addressed by SSDs). I'm sure that the new tech coming down the pipes for magnetic storage are going to do wonders for capacities but at some point that almost becomes a liability since there will always be a huge performance bottleneck.Reply

Prices are going down, they are still just very high per GB compared to magnetic drives. If they can get in the range of double the cost of HDDs in the next 2-3 years I think you'll see everything move over to SSD given all the other benefits.

I think what you're feeling is that the capacity isn't going up at all. I can't really see being able to buy a 2TB SSD for less than $400 in the next few years. I do see being able to buy a 250GB drive for $80 which is about 2x what an equivalent 500GB regular HDD costs if you bought two SSDs. Seems capacity is very non-linear and nothing has improved.Reply

The capacity issue could be mitigated a whole bunch if the SSD folks built them on 3.5 form factor. Some truly enterprise SSD vendors till do. The volume difference is substantial. Instead, we get TLC stuff.Reply

3.5" drives have the same dice in there as 2.5" drives and the controller PCB layout wouldn't be any cheaper either. If you look at prices of current generation SSDs, the 256GB version usually have the best price/GB. Unless you are saying that NAND packages with more dice are more expensive (which I can't see when I compare drives of different NAND package sizes with one another, often enough those with 4 dice are cheaper than those with 2 dice), then I don't see how going to 3.5" SSDs is going to make capacities cheaper.Reply

On the recent SSD reviews, thanks for taking the time to let us know about the tool box utilities!!

After years of using OCZ, I just deployed my first Intel 520 a month ago. It's a solid 'no hiccup' performer so far.

Now that the 840 Pro makes Samsung competitive with the best SSDs on performance, warranty, and utilities, I look forward to trying it out.

I particularly like the idea of being able to use the Samsung Magician software to set the spare area. All of my machines have other drives for bulk data, so being able to allocate some unused space on the SSD for use as spare area seems logical.

It very well might, EIST has been known to cause problems for SSD's in the past.Also would be very interesting to hear Anands thoughts on the power consumption concerns raised above (DIPM: Device Initiated Power Management)Reply

"Assuming the premature death of our review sample was a fluke and not indicative of a bigger issue,"Care to elaborate on this? It simply failed after you guys ran all the tests on it?Is there any way you guys might get another sample and run it through the same (or harder) tests?

We managed to run all of our normal tests (i.e. the stuff needed for this review) and Anand was simply running some enterprise tests to see how the 840 Pro behaves there. This is quite normal testing for us, so it's not like we were trying to break the drive on purpose.

A new drive is already on its way to Anand, plus I have the regular 840. Reply

hasseb64: look at the previous comments regarding DIPM & EIST.There might be some problems with the testing performed, lack of DIPM can have a huge power consumption difference...The sampling interval of the device they use to measure power consumption is also very important since SSD's switch power states very very frequently...Reply

I just have to say, this drive impressed me. If the stability is the same as 830 Samsung has a real winner here.

One of the things i note here is something i've noticed the lack of in other SSDs earlier, and been vocal about. Since the SSDs have large DRAM buffers, they should easily be able to use it as a read-ahead for small block sequential and low QD sequential reads. Going by the iometer 128KB seq read and ATTO graphs, i'd say this is exactly what samsung has done.It also seems they have implemented a decent sized write buffer to do the same for writes. Let's hope it's implemented safely so you don't loose or corrupt data on powerloss.

I've been recommending 830 lately, and if early reports (after the first month) indicate 840 pro is stable, it will be the my recommendation if the prices are decent.

With the maxing of SATA 6Gbps getting close (or is already here?), it's now time for SATA Express or just native PCIe SSDs.Reply

Hey Kristian between the 840 Pro and the M5 Pro which would you choose? It would be going into a 2011 MBP for both OS X and Boot Camp. I'm looking to get a 512 GB drive and it looks like the M5 Pro is going to coming in at less than $450, so my thought is to get the drive that is the cheapest. Please let me know. Thanks.Reply

In real world usage I expect a 840 PRO wont feel any faster than my 830 at all, and the fact they sweep aside a quickly driving drive as not relevant is a worry.

Whilst performance is important, reliability is something I value higher. Also value for money shouldnt be ignored either, so in my opinion the best thing about this drive is it is making the 830 cheaper.

Also the non pro 840 uses TLC which I suspect reduces life expectancy and increases CRC error rates, I would avoid the normal 840 completely whilst MLC drives are still on the market.

So thanks for the review and thanks for the price drops samsung so now I can buy another 830 this time for my laptop :).Reply

I'm seeing them in stock all the time now. I was just about to order one when I saw that updated comment about both samples dying. I was patting myself on the back for not jumping in on the bleeding edge and had decided that now the technology is mature enough and reliable plus the comfort of the 5 yr warranty so time to dive in....

Of course, 2 samples dying, while a bit off putting, is far from statistically significant.

When I enable the HD Password setting in my BIOS, as soon as I reboot the laptop and enter the password when prompted I get a disk error message. I have tried this on two different ThinkPad laptops and with two different SSD 840 Pro Drives.

Luckily, I can go back into BIOS, enter the password I created and remove the password and the drives show up fine. I read that some OCZ SSD drives had issues with BIOS passwords and that was fixed with a SSD firmware update. I don't know if this has a similar issue with my ThinkPads.

I talked to Samsung support, though they basically said it should work and they have not heard of any issues. I don't think many users actual enable the BIOS HD Password (and therefor enable the encryption protection).

I don't think there is really anything I could be doing wrong *though I would be happy is someone could tell me I am), since it is a simple matter of just enabling the password in BIOS. I know I am using the assigned password and that the drive accepts it, since it lets me past the prompt when I put the correct password. The problem is that at that point the drive looks invalid to BIOS. It doesn't just skip the drive, I get a "Error 0200 Failure Fixed Disk 0" error and my only option is to enter BIOS.

I have an old conventional drive with hardware FDE that works fine on the same laptop.

So, again, I am just wondering is this is working for anyone else?Reply

Beware of these drives. They are not reliable. I have 2 piece of this. They can't be used in the RAID Array. They freeze in the range 2-48 hours and become unavailable to next computer power off/on cycle. Samsung refuses any support to correct this bug. Samsung support said."Samsugn does not provide RAID support regarding the units. The units can be placed in the array however it is at the users discretion."Reply